More than 1,000 scientists and public officials gathered in New Orleans on Monday for the most comprehensive review of scientific information about the short- and long-term effects of the BP Deepwater Horizon accident and spill since it occurred in April 2010. The three-dayGulf of Mexico Oil Spill & Ecosystem Science Conferenceis aimed at understanding the effects of pollution resulting from the spill and its effect on natural systems in the Gulf and along the shoreline, and on the people who live and work there.

"This conference is designed to bring together the research community in the Gulf of Mexico and scientists interested in working in this area, and in the area of oil spill research," said Rita Colwell, chairwoman of the board of the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, which administers the 10-year, $500 million science program underwritten by BP soon after the spill.

"We know from an already published report, from our funding, that there has not been an increased concentration of hydrocarbons in oysters or their shells, a finding I think is critical," Colwell said. Another study, using monitoring devices placed in buoys that drift with currents in the Gulf of Mexico also shows that little, if any, of the oil released in the Gulf in 2010 made its way around the tip of Florida and then up the East Coast.

Only one of the drifter buoys made its way to the East Coast, she said.

Other research has confirmed that microorganisms living in the warmer Gulf waters do a good job of degrading oil molecules quickly, she said.

The conference was kicked off by retired Adm. Thad Allen, former commander of the Coast Guard and now a senior vice president with the Booz Allen Hamilton engineering firm. Allen was the national incident commander on behalf of the federal government during the spill.

Retired U.S. Adm. Thad Allen, left, the national incident commander during the BP oil spill, and Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser were photographed Aug. 31, 2010, at a news conference at Shady Grove Marina.

Allen provided a brief overview of the difficulties he dealt with as national incident commander, representing the federal government in the oil-spill response.He had to deal with the unprecedented breadth of the nation's largest oil spill, which involved the release of 4.9 million barrels of oil from a well that was a mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, and had the potential of affecting the coastlines of five Gulf states.

A significant problem was simply explaining to state and local officials and the general public how the national response would work under the federal Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which was passed by Congress in the aftermath of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill in Alaska.

Allen said Congress required the "responsible party" for an oil spill to respond to an accident, arrange the cleanup and, with federal agencies and representatives of states as public trustees, identify damage to natural resources and develop a plan to restore the resources. The federal government would have a supervisory role, but it would be up to BP and its drilling partners to actually clean up the mess.

That was a dramatically different governing structure than the response to Hurricane Katrina, where Allen also held a senior federal oversight role. State and local officials were used to having a direct role in response, often equal to or greater than the federal government, and Allen said explaining to parish officials that BP would choose who would do cleanup work, including the development of the "vessels of opportunity" program, at times proved difficult.

It was equally difficult for federal officials to recognize that in Louisiana, where much of the on-the-ground remediation work would take place, that parish governments would be significant players, he said.

Even though the federal government and industry attempted to clear some scientific issues likely to be raised during a major oil spill response, sometimes those efforts were not adequate, Allen said, such as in the approval of dispersants and the use of in-situ burning to keep as much oil as possible from reaching the shoreline.

"Clearly, that process was not good enough for the public and political leaders," when it became clear that dispersants were being used in unprecedented amounts to turn oil into droplets both at the surface and a mile deep, he said.

Allen said he stepped in several times to assure baseline scientific research was conducted in the Gulf of Mexico that could be used during later Natural Resource Damage Assessment studies. Responders also were ill-equipped to deal with health issues, ranging from concerns about the quality of testing to support seafood safety, to the suicide of an Alabama boat captain participating in the Vessel of Opportunity program.

To overcome many of these problems, the Oil Pollution Act and other laws must be changed to develop a more unified structure than can work across legal and political boundaries, a rethinking that Congress has not yet tackled, Allen said.

Another issue that Congress has not resolved is the boundary between the Coast Guard and the Department of Interior over regulation of offshore drilling, he said. Traditionally, the Coast Guard governs surface vessels, while Interior governs drilling operations. But as the Deepwater Horizon oil rig's explosion and fire and the ensuing oil spill showed, that regulatory authority can overlap, causing problems in enforcement and in response, he said.

"We don't exactly have an overachieving Congress right now," he said.

Allen also recommended that scientific information collected before and during the response to oil spills be released to the public as quickly as possible, and be withheld only when there was a clear legal or security reason. Withholding quality scientific information being developed under the joint incident command just doesn't make sense, he said, when independent scientific information is being released that could result in misunderstandings about effects on the environment or public health.

"In my mind, the rule should be total disclosure, total transparency," he said.

In a panel after Allen's speech, five scientists outlined what was known before the spill and where they think additional research on the effects of the spill should be focused.

A public forum Tuesday at 7 p.m. will feature coastal researcher Donald Boesch, a New Orleans native who was a member of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and director of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Studies, and Steven Murawski, a fishery biologist who served as the chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the spill and now is teaching at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science.

John Farrington, a retired Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute researcher who is now interim provost at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, said scientists actually had experience with major spills in the past, including the 1979 blowout of the Ixtoc 1 well in the Bay of Campeche in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico, which resulted in the spill of 3 million barrels of oil.

Scientists also had reviewed potential effects of future spills, such as the National Science Foundation study, Oil in the Sea III, that outlined what would happen with a similar blowout at about the same depth as BP's Macondo well.

What that study missed, however, was the use of dispersants at the wellhead, which resulted in the suspension of tiny droplets of oil and gas deep below the surface.

In the early weeks of the spill, the scientific community also was able to take advantage of the National Science Foundation's "RAPID" grant program and BP's quick commitment to a 10-year, $500-million grant program to begin gathering information, Farrington said. But he said the failure of Congress to provide enough money to pay for the collection of baseline scientific data in the Gulf in the years before the spill was a problem.

And there's quite a bit of basic research that remains undone, he said, including the socioeconomic and human health effects of spills, the long-term effects of contamination of seafood by oil degradation products and the complex interaction between oil and other stressors in the Gulf on the environment and the public.

"We know that oil spills are one of many multiple stressors of the ecosystem," he said. "We know of the leaking into the environment of natural seeps and also from the dribble, dribble, dribble of our daily lives," he said. "Will we be better prepared? Each time we go through an exercise, we are not as well prepared as we should be.

"I hope the next generation of science makes sure we are prepared," he said.

A key place to start, said Murawski, is with the networks of public and private ocean-observing stations that are not yet coordinated into a comprehensive system for collecting the basic information necessary to describe the ecosystem in the Gulf.

Developing a coordinated system that could collect scientific information throughout the Gulf could be used to determine the effects of the spill in relation to the larger Gulf ecosystem, could be used to monitor recovery of the Gulf in the spill's aftermath, and help scientists, governments and industry prepare for the next disaster, he said.

Some segments of that system already are in place, such as the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium's annual sampling program aimed at outlining the breadth of the annual low-oxygen dead zone along the coast of Louisiana.

But Murawski said the opportunity exists for a major expansion of information gathering by making use of the thousands of privately-owned oil and gas platforms for establishment of permanent stations as a "primary observing backbone" along the coast and in deep water.

The information collected from such stations should include contaminant levels in water and sediments; the levels of toxic chemicals like polychlorinated aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, in seafood and other marine species; the abundance and distribution of sea turtles and marine mammals; the frequency and distribution of fish diseases; and the location of deep ocean communities in relation to areas vulnerable to oil spills or other environmental hazards.

In the eastern Gulf, where oil exploration and production have not occurred, information could be gathered using emerging technology, such as submersible "gliders," that can collect scientific information.

Research also needs to focus on what is a "healthy Gulf" for the residents who live along its coast and work on its waters, said Maureen Lichtveld, chairwoman of the Department of Global Environmental Health Sciences at Tulane University. "Research takes time, but communities can't wait," Lichtveld said.

In the aftermath of the spill, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has begun a comprehensive study of the long-term effects of oil and oil byproducts from the spill on workers involved in the clean-up. The institute already has interviewed more than 31,000 such workers, Lichtveld said, and hopes that 35,000 will participate in the 10-year study.

The national Institute of Medicine also has identified other human health research priorities for the spill aftermath, including psychosocial and behavioral effects, short-term and long-term seafood safety and methods to communicate with and engage the public in the aftermath of disasters.

Colwell said discussions that took place during the first day of the conference confirm what the board of her research group had already concluded: more emphasis must be placed on research into human health and socioeconomic effects of the spill.

"We knew we had a gap, and it was reinforced already at this meeting, that we msut focus on public health, and I think we need to focus as well on the socioeconomic impacts," she said. That decision will translate into new workshops to discuss both public health and socioeconomic research during the next year, she said.

For Michael Orbach, an anthropologist and director of the coastal environmental management program at Duke University, a key area of missing research is in how to weigh the tradeoffs between the biophysical, social and economic benefits of a healthy ecosystem and the benefits to the public of developing oil and gas and other mineral resources that can injure those resources.

"We have a lack of historical involvement and data from social scientists," in the process leading to decisions involving those resources, he said.

That lack extends to this week's conference, he said, where only two of its 19 topic areas directly addresses effects on humans, rather than the physical environment.

Among Monday's science sessions were two outlining research conducted on heavily oiled patches of wetlands in the Bay Jimmy area of Barataria Bay in Plaquemines Parish.

One study led by Tulane University ecology and evolutionary biology graduate student Brittany Bernik found that native genetic varieties of smooth cordgrass, or Spartina alterniflora, were more likely to grow and survive future storm events when used to re-vegetate marsh areas impacted by oil. The research is aimed at finding more successful ways of regrowing oiled area in the aftermath of spills.

A second study, discussed by Atkins North America scientist Scott Zengel, found limited success in only one method of removing weathered oil from heavily-oiled segments of the Bay Jimmy wetlands.

In that area, oil that came ashore coated cordgrass and also seeped into the organic combination of roots and soil beneath it. Spill responders must weigh the erosive effects of mechanical removal of such oil, which can often result in wetland areas quickly turning into open water.

His company tried a variety of methods to remove oil from the area. Flushing patches with low pressure water from a sprinkler system was completely ineffective, he said. It didn't even wash an oily sheen off of affected areas.

Using string trimmers to remove oily vegetative matter from the top of the affected area also did little to help free the oil beneath it.

Manually raking the area seemed to work, as it got the matted grass to stand up and allowed more liquid oil beneath it to be exposed to the elements, allowing it to degrade, he said. But within a few weeks, the oil mousse in the soil below resurfaced, and the remaining grass laid down again.

Work crews also were required to use boardwalks to do the work, as stepping into the wetlands tended to push the oil deeper into the soil.

Experiments with surface washing agents, similar to dishwashing liquid, also were unsuccessful, he said.

A combination of raking and then using wet vaccum cleaners to try to vacuum up the oil also proved unworkable, removing too much soil with a minimal amount of oil and creating gouges in the sediment, he said.

The most successful effort, Zengel said, was cutting of thick mats of wetland grasses held together by weathered oil, using power hedge clippers. A month later, workers returned to find the thick mousse layer had been reduced, as the remaining oil weathered and broke up into a more solid form.

But Zengel warned that the method must only be used in the areas with heavily oiled wetlands, where the damage caused by the removal method is less than the continued damage from the oil.